Death of a Prom Queen

Joan McGrath is a Toronto Board of Education library consultant.

Most high school reunions are fairly jolly affairs, featuring lots of drinks and the resurrection of a few almost forgotten anecdotes. When it’s all over, the old yearbooks go back into the cedar until next time. The fifteen-year get-together of the Vista View High School grads, however, doesn’t quite follow the usual pattern. It begins, as expected, in a spirit of cheerful nostalgia; turns sour when the participants receive nasty, threatening letters; and ends in murder. Someone, it seems, still carries a smouldering grudge over unhappy times as a teenager in the long-ago high school years, and someone means to have that past bitterness avenged. Fear spreads among the survivors when a second grad murder is discovered. It has become clear that the crimes are the work of a member of the grad group, and only another of the old high school crowd can piece the puzzle together, in this run-of-the-mill but readable thriller.